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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

What a sinister way of saying that I do things in sequence! Would I could do it in parallel—the time it would save—but my yogic powers don't go that far.

I didn't look at your profile description. I'm not moderating you, or anyone else, in particular. It's just a job, and quite routine.

Comments can be flamewar without being uncivil—there are lots of ways to spread flamewar. One is generic ideological rhetoric. Please stop posting like that here: it's boring, and makes HN threads much worse. We want curious conversation, and generic ideological rhetoric is the far opposite of that.

"Echo chamber" is the sort of thing people say when they imagine that the system, the moderators, and the community are biased against them. But the opposite team feels exactly the same way. It's a mechanical bias:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

View on HN

In theory I agree wholeheartedly, however in practice HN consistently allows off-topic far left political spam while marking any attempts to combat it as a "flame war". This phenomenon is more than a psychological bias: it's a self-reinforcing artifact of HN's demographics.

I offer you a challenge:

I will provide you with quantitative data that I am correct on this issue, and in return you remove the restrictions on my account.

First, the restrictions on your account are because you've been breaking the site guidelines. The way to get those removed is to provide evidence that you've stopped breaking the guidelines and won't break them in the future. That has nothing to do with any of this other stuff—it's not as if being right about bias or demographics (if in fact you are) would make it ok for you to break HN's rules, although people often act as if that non sequitur were true.

Second, it's not obvious how to study this kind of thing quantitatively without making interpretive calls, and whoever controls the interpretive calls completely controls the outcome of the study. In other words, all this would do is reproduce the same cake at a meta level, just with a distorting layer of pseudo-objective icing. The chance that anyone with strong ideological passions is going to run some quantitative analysis about this and come up with anything but the conclusion they already believed, is approximately zero. Has there ever been any study of this sort that did that?

I'm not saying that a good quantitative analysis is impossible, but it would need to rigorously account for this effect (of people reading into the data what they already perceive and believe). How to do that is not obvious, and any 'offer' that comes without a serious plan for it screams bogusness to me. I don't mean to imply that you're intentionally making a bogus offer, just that one would be foolish to take it.

Besides all that, the one empirical analysis you've offered so far ("I watched you single out all of my comments, and then later go back for a second pass to flag the other posters too after you read my profile description") was completely imaginary. That's hardly unique to you—it's just devilishly difficult to perceive these things objectively. The mind simply can't resist its own narratives.

All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber, and if I can objectively demonstrate my hypothesis that lopsided moderation is reinforcing that same echo chamber, then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point.

My initial thinking is to use a text classifier to assign political alignments, or lack thereof, to HN comments. From there I can compile statistics about each of the comment classes. This entire process can be done in an executable jupyter notebook for visibility and verification of results.

> All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber

You could justify anything that way. That is the sort of thing garden-variety trolls come up with.

> then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point

That doesn't follow from your premise at all.

Edit: btw, I thought I'd deleted this - I think it failed to go through because of a network failure. I tell people not to do these tit-for-tat things and try to avoid them myself for the most part (which often means succumbing to temptation and then editing or deleting after the fact). Since you've replied, though, I'll leave it up now.

Dang, it's your choice. We can all learn something from this small scale experiment and come out a little more well informed on HN's community dynamics, or we can let it grow into something larger. Again, totally up to you.

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